Immersive vs. Frictionless: Getting the Experience Right

In user experience design, there are typically two design directions — immersive-focused and frictionless-focused. In an immersive-focused design, the designer values user engagement and aims to build an experience that elicits an emotional connection with users. In a frictionless-focused design, the designer optimizes for efficiency with the ultimate goal of helping users complete a task in the easiest and quickest way possible.

The success of a design often hinges on the ability to identify and execute these directions well. This article breaks down the goals and approaches of immersive-focused design and frictionless-focused design.

Immersive and Frictionless: The Ikea Analogy

To differentiate the two design directions, I often draw comparisons to the shopping experience at Ikea. For immersive-focused, the user experience should be like the Ikea showroom, a guided experience designed for you to interact with their items and envision a lifestyle put forward by them. Conversion is an end goal but not an immediate goal.

Frictionless-focused design, on the other hand, is similar to the warehouse part of Ikea, where the space is designed to help customers find the furniture they are looking for as easily as possible, with aisles and shelves are organized with numbers and letters and kiosks where customers can get help if needed.

This analogy not only grounds my design approach but also helps stakeholders understand my rationale behind design decisions.

Immersive-Focused Designs

An immersive experience draws audiences into an environment and keeps them engaged. This is usually valued when your design goal is to build relationships with your users, attract them to be on your site/app longer, and entice them to interact with what you offer. Some examples where the designs are immersive-focused include

• A marketing page that promotes a product, feature, or service
• A feed-based site or app that wants users to engage with the content
• A dashboard that shows insights to your users

Metrics

When evaluating a design aimed to immerse users, we often look at the following metrics:

Time on page
Overall, more active time spent on a page signals that your users are engaged. Of course, if the time is unusually long, it could mean that the site or app is confusing or broken.

Feature usage
You want users to interact with features offered on the page. Segmenting users into return users and new users may bring you additional insights in how features are used.

Bounce rate
A high bounce rate signals that the content of your page fails to capture users’ attention or the content was not what they expected

Designing for Immersiveness

Leveraging brand personality
Activating elements from a brand is an easy but effective way to create an immersive experience. At the very basic, heavy utilization of illustrations, fonts, icons, and photographs that follow branding principles can build a consistent and solid visual foundation. Additionally, small details like adding animations and writing copies with tones and voices aligned with the brand can elevate the experience drastically.

Invite users to interact
Engaging designs often ask audiences to, well, engage with the product. For example, a mortgage website can help users estimate loan payments by providing a calculator. Inviting your prospects to interact with your product, even in a minor way, builds brand connections.

Provide recommended actions
An immersive-focused design is not a “hands-off” design — we still want to guide users to discover other features, content, or the conversion path. For example, on a product landing page, we may want to insert a signup button in the bottom half of the page in case engaged users want to try the product. On a dashboard, we may want to surface actionable insights to tell users what they can do next. By pointing our audience in a direction, we can maintain the engagement we’ve built.

Frictionless-Focused Designs

This type of design prioritizes efficiency and accuracy, enabling users to move through a flow without hiccups. This design direction is often taken when you are helping users complete a task and you want to offer the most straightforward and clear path. Examples of places where frictionless design is preferred include:

• A workflow where users need to complete a task quickly and easily
• During a conversion event, such as signing up or making the purchase

Metrics

To examine whether an experience is frictionless, the metrics we want to look at are

Time on task
Our goal is to help users complete the task ASAP and get out of the way, so a shorter time on task is generally favorable.

Task completion rate
We don’t want users to abandon the task.

Usability satisfaction
We can also use qualitative measures (how easy is it to use X) to evaluate usability.

Designing for a Frictionless Experience

On the surface, a frictionless experience should feel simple and easy, but to achieve that outcome, there are a lot of design considerations that are involved.

Anticipation as a design skill

We’ve all heard of the “don’t make me think” motto. However, many workflows are inherently complicated, and it is unrealistic to expect a design that doesn’t require any sort of user cognitive expense. But regardless of how easy or complicated a task is, a designer’s job is to make the task feel easy. This is why we pinpoint friction points and build solutions around it. For example, if the user is asked to make decisions between options that they are not familiar with, you should provide them with information such as explanations on what these options mean, what people typically select, the desirable option in different scenarios, etc.

Familiarity is desirable
Use common, consistent, and recognizable components in the design so that users can focus on completing the task instead of learning how to use the UI component.

Make users feel like they are in control
Being in control brings us comfort. For a workflow design to feel intuitive, it is important that we empower users by providing context and control. We want to show them where they are in the process, allow them to save drafts, and provide immediate feedback such as error validations to make users feel in control.

A Hybrid Experience

Although immersive-focused designs and frictionless-focused designs may seem to be on the two ends of a spectrum, it’s very rare that a product experience is solely immersive or frictionless. For instance, an immersive social media app whose success is dependent on user engagement should enable users to send DMs frictionlessly. A stock trading app with the ultimate goal of facilitating easy stock transactions still wants to create an immersive UX to stand out from the competition.

Good designs pick one dominant experience while thoughtfully incorporating elements of the other. How do we strike a balance? The most useful approach I’ve found is to go back to the user journey and identify where users have the bandwidth to engage and where we should let users just focus on getting one thing done. But whichever direction you decide to optimize for, setting the experience direction is an important step in the design process that should not be missed.